WASHINGTON – In a scene from a tourist nightmare, two Americans and six other seekers of gorillas in the mist were hacked and battered to death in Uganda by machete-wielding Hutu rebels, survivors said.

“The rebels were looking for Americans and British,” said Hussein Kivumbi, manager of one of the camps at the Impenetrable Forest where the attack began at a site where tourists trek to find the rare apes.

“They wanted them to move fast, but some couldn’t. So they killed with machetes one man and one woman who couldn’t walk. Then they killed another three. There was no rescue.”

The two dead Americans were identified as Rob Haubner, 48, and his wife, Susan Miller, 42, of Hillsboro, Ore., who worked for Intel, the computer-chip maker, company officials said. They were on their third trip to Africa.

Also slain were four Britons and two New Zealanders during a forced march through the rain forest by Hutu rebels like those responsible for the genocidal murders of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994.

Survivors said the attack began soon after dawn Monday with a burst of gunfire echoing through the camps and vibrating across the valley in the Bwindi National Park.

The rebel band – clad in ragtag civilian clothes and gumboots, armed with AK-47s and submachine guns – herded captives from several camps together and ordered them to begin marching into the dense forest about 7:20 a.m.

A Ugandan game warden and three park rangers were killed trying to stop the rebels, who seized a total of 31 hostages. Seventeen escaped or were freed and the other 14 were led into the forest.

Mark Ross, an Arkansas-born pilot and tour operator who now lives in Kenya, said he counted 117 rebels in the assault “but the line went out of sight into the forest.”

One of the captives was France’s deputy ambassador, Anne Peltier, with her two daughters. They were lucky – one of the girls started to cry and the rebels left them behind and gave her a message blaming Americans and British for not backing “the ethnic Hutu majority.”

As they marched on, one American – Linda Adams of Alamo, Calif., faked an asthma attack and Ross – acting as spokesman for the captives – asked if she could be freed. She was, and made it back to safety.

But two other women were having trouble walking and were supposed to be escorted back by two soldiers in the rebel band. They never made it.

“The women that we’d been told would be escorted back had been killed on the spot. It looked like one of them had been raped before being killed, the other was just killed,” Ross said.

He said the victims “had their heads crushed in and deep slashes with machetes.” Some of the victims’ bodies had notes from the rebels aimed at Americans and Britons: “We don’t want you on our land. You support our enemies.”

Ross said he finally negotiated freedom for the remaining hostages about 4 p.m. local time on Monday, carrying back a message from the rebels that “they were hunting Tutsis and they wanted the world to know Uganda was a war zone.”

He added: “They said they would come back and wouldn’t take any hostages … you will be killed on sight.”

Ross said the survivors made it back to their camp at 6:30 p.m. When he couldn’t find the keys to his plane, he turned the ignition with his knife and flew most of the group back to Uganda’s capital of Kampala.

The attackers were believed to be former Hutu militiamen – the group responsible for the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus, many of them women and children, were murdered in an orgy of blood and rape.

The Clinton administration urged tourists to postpone any visits to the gorilla habitat for now – and travel groups that run the tours scrambled to cancel them, at least for the next few months.